


Ghost in the Garden

by Linden



Series: Sail and Mast [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-20 21:24:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3665577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maeve's new neighbors were easy on the eyes, but there was something unsettling about them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FrancesHouseman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrancesHouseman/gifts).



> This is for the lovely FrancesHouseman, who heard much of it first.
> 
> The title hails from Gregory Alan Isakov's _Second Chances_ , and the fic itself is an outsider POV based off of the following little bit of _Anchor and Moor_ , because I have a thing for outsider POVs and Sam’s scars, and also because I am kinda sorta maybe deeply invested in the idea of there being folks who live on the edges of the supernatural world:
> 
>  
> 
> _He met their neighbors, one evening when he went out the back door to investigate a terrific bang and found a lawn mower smoking sadly on the other side of the fence, and a slim woman in her sixties cursing at it inventively. Dean was never entirely clear on how that had ended up with him and Sam being invited to dinner in her backyard, but the steaks were delicious and the beers were cold, and Dean liked both Erin and her older sister, a retired economics professor from Cornell. After dinner Maeve and Sam sat talking comfortably about whatever it was really smart people talked about while Erin fixed the lawn mower in the shed, and Dean sat comfortably on the floor and handed her things._

**April 2022**

It was late evening in Ithaca, windy and cool, and Maeve was tucked up on the porch with an Irish coffee and one of her broken clocks, when a great black behemoth of a car came rumbling up the street.  She glanced up from the tiny ratchet wheel she was working on, curious.  It had been a good six or seven years since she’d seen anything other than a quiet hybrid tooling around town, and this beast was all heavy steel and glossy paint and shining chrome, easing into the drive next door with a decidedly un-PC growl and a purr.  Erin, lover of all things old and loud and mechanical, was already coming out from the kitchen, eyes alight, before the engine even went quiet in the dusk.  ‘327 four barrel,’ she said, as though that meant anything to Maeve at all. ‘Gotta be. Nothing else sounds like a three-twen—and oh, my God, she’s a ‘67 Chevy.’ There was something in her voice that sounded very much like reverence. ‘Oh, _look_ at her, Maeve.’

Maeve looked. Maeve saw a big black noisy car. 

‘It’s, um.  Very pretty,’ she said, dutifully, as the driver’s door creaked open.

The tired-looking man who got out was probably in his forties, and _he_ was certainly very pretty, dressed in worn jeans and boots and a soft grey tee beneath warm flannel. He was already moving around the front of the car as his passenger started to climb out, careful and slow. The other man was dressed in the same kind of clothes as the driver, and he had soft dark hair falling forward into his eyes, and memories of Elías and of the cancer ward at Cayuga Medical were suddenly blooming fresh and dark and unlovely in Maeve’s mind, because this other man looked as though he might be dying.

Her sister’s hands settled on her shoulders, soft-skinned and warm.

‘Easy, Sammy,’ the driver said, as he got a shoulder beneath the thin man’s arm to take some of his weight.  He had a nice voice, gravelly and low, and Maeve watched with quiet concern as he helped the other man (Sam?) toward the house and steadied him as they made their slow, careful way up the porch stairs. ‘We’re gonna rest in the foyer for a couple minutes when we get in, okay?’

Sam’s voice was wry.  ‘Yeah?  Will there be lollipops?’ 

‘ . . . what?’

‘You’re treating me like I’m two, Dean.’ 

From the tenderness evident in the other man’s hands, she expected an apology, or gentle reassurance, but, ‘Dude, you were better than this at walking when you _were_ two,’ was what she heard instead, and Sam snorted out a sweet, startled laugh, leaned a little into his companion as Dean fished keys from his back pocket with one hand, opened the front door.  It closed behind them a moment later, and after a moment more Erin squeezed her shoulders, gently, in love and comfort and remembrance, and went back inside.  Maeve sat turning her wedding band ( _widow band, now_ ) for a long while on her finger before she returned to her work.

For the first time in a long while that night, she dreamed of Elías.


	2. Chapter 2

It was a month before Maeve met their new neighbors.

Alice, over for lunch three days later, confessed that she hadn't asked too many questions when Dean had called about the advert, or even when he'd come to take a look at the second floor of the house. The grad student she'd been renting to had already been behind in the rent when he'd cracked up, taken off and left her with only the occasional cricket for a tenant, and Dean had had a thousand dollars in three neat rolls in his jacket pocket and a sheriff in both Minnesota and South Dakota willing to vouch for him, and that was all Alice had needed to know. But she was fairly certain that he and Sam were brothers, and that Dean was older; she hadn't yet met Sam, and to Erin’s vast displeasure she had no opinions whatsoever about their car. 

Their last name was Winchester, like the rifle.

They kept mostly to themselves, the Winchester men. Maeve was pretty sure that Dean was working at Nan’s garage, only because her granddaughter came to visit one Friday all googly-eyed about the new _totally gorgeous old guy, Grandma, oh my God_ who’d worked on Richard’s car. ( _Old_. He was forty, maybe forty-five; he was a _child_.) From her study window she saw Sam outside sometimes in the afternoons, sitting out back in the warm spring sun; and Dean had waved, once, when he’d been hauling a trash can back from the curb as she'd been turning into her drive from her usual morning walk, but he’d been back inside the house by the time she’d caught her breath, and neither he nor his brother was ever in the yard in the evenings, when the neighborhood tended to drift outdoors after supper and chat comfortably over fences.  She and Erin had both thought about knocking at their door some evening with a plate of muffins or a pie, just to introduce themselves and be neighborly, but there was something . . . it was difficult for her to explain, really, but not at all difficult for her to sense, and she recognized it from the first few months after Elías had gone into remission, years ago, and from the last few months he’d been alive this past winter.  When he’d first been getting well, and then again when he’d been dying, she’d been jealous of anyone who’d taken even a moment of his time, from the nurses to the oldest and best beloved of their friends; she’d wanted it all, selfishly, for herself—every possible moment she could have, to lock up safe in her heart against the terror of having nearly lost him and then against the grief of knowing that she soon would.  And remembering the gentle possessiveness of Dean's hands as he’d helped his brother up the front walk and stairs the evening they’d moved in, the careful way he’d cradled Sam’s thin body against his own, Maeve would have been willing to wager her second-best mainspring winder that he was feeling the same.

She would have been willing to wager it, too, on the guess that this wasn't the first time Dean had dealt with loss, averted or real; not the first time either of them had. Half a lifetime ago, before economics and Elías and Cornell, Maeve had served three tours of duty as a line nurse in Vietnam, and she recognized combat veterans when she saw them. Ill as he might have been, Sam still moved with the same trained, predatory grace she remembered from the men at Fort Bliss and in Cu Chi, and in the set of Dean's shoulders and spine was the mirror of every Marine she had ever known. She wondered, idly, where they had served, what they had seen.

She and Erin gave them their space. Sam was, clearly, either dying or healing—and as the days rolled on, and Maeve saw him outside more and more from her window, looking brighter, looking stronger, she began to suspect that it was the latter, and she was glad.

***

Alice had said that she thought the two of them were brothers. But in the middle of May, as Maeve roused just a little from an impromptu nap on the back porch, she saw Dean leaning down to kiss a drowsy, smiling Sam where he was sitting in their yard in the sunlight. She realized then that they were lovers—husbands, probably, since they shared the same last name.

She turned the heavy gold ring on her left hand, once, twice, and her smile as she drifted back to sleep was bittersweet.

***

It was on an unseasonably hot morning just before June that she saw Sam, shirtless and barefoot, carrying a half basket of wet clothes to the line in the bright spring sunshine. Cutting flowers at the kitchen sink, Maeve paused a moment to appreciate the view—she was seventy-three, not dead—and then realized that she was looking at a corpse.

He had an impossible scar on his spine.

It was knotted and ugly and old, twisting through the smooth flesh just above the small of his back. It was also utterly unmistakable for what it was.  It had been decades since Maeve had had a full-blown flashback to the medical tents of Vietnam, and she didn’t now, but all the same for a long moment she could smell the acrid bite of gunpowder and sweat and mud and fear here in their clean, bright, quiet kitchen, fifty years and 8500 miles away from Cu Chi. She knew the kind of wound that his scar must have healed up from, because she’d seen it, more than once: a knife thrust just to the side of the spine, and then a sharp, brutal twist to sever the spinal cord.  But men didn’t scar from that kind of wound; men didn’t _heal_ from that kind of wound; men died on their knees in agony from that kind of wound, with their comrades unable to do anything but hold them as their last few breaths bled out.  Those wounds hadn’t been ones she’d treated; they’d been ones she’d seen on the dead, when she’d sometimes helped prepare their bodies for burial in the quiet hours of the night.

The water was still running, cool over her hands, her blooms scattered in the sink and forgotten as she watched Sam finish with his laundry, make his way back inside. 

_How are you alive?_

A moment later, she feared she knew.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone please shout if I've f***ed up the Spanish! Feedback on whether Sam is in character here would also be hugely appreciated; I had a bitch of a time with his voice.

She said nothing to Erin, because there was nothing really she could say, besides _sweetheart, the man next door might be a monster, or maybe a demon or a shifter, and oh, by the way, yes, monsters are real and I know this because I saw one of them kill our sister_ , and that seemed ill-advised.   Two days later, after Erin had met Dean across a smoking lawn mower at the fence line, Sam Winchester was her dinner guest.

Emily Post, she was sure, had no suggestions to offer about comportment at dinner with a dead man, nor what to serve him, nor whether it were impolite to inquire as to why he was not in a coffin, and Maeve was firm in her opinion that this marked a serious gap in Emily Post’s treatises on manners.  But as Erin fired up the grill and got the steaks going outside, Maeve dug out the good silver service that had been their mother’s, and got fresh salt from the pantry and a small vial of holy water from her closet chest. The salt and silver went on the patio table, and she tipped the holy water into a pitcher of cold, honeyed green tea. It was from the spring below the well chapel at the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, strong enough to exorcise a demon without a spell, and added nothing but a bright clean _zing_ to the tea that someone might easily mistake for lemon. It was only after Sam Winchester was settled on a cushioned wrought-iron chair in her yard twenty minutes later, looking far too slim but still lovely in worn jeans and a tee shirt with his long hair pulled back, that she realized she didn’t have the first damn clue what to _do_ if any of her tests besides the holy water succeeded.

Screaming seemed a good first step, of course, but it wasn’t as though that would be a useful one. 

. . . maybe she could stab him, with the butter knife.

She watched him quietly through the meal. He ate easily with their mother’s old silver, added salt to his steak, drank off not one but two glasses of his holy-water-infused iced tea without a flinch, didn’t go black-eyed and snarling at Erin’s exasperated ‘Oh, for Christ’s _sake_!’ when Barnabas’ tiny teacup poodle started barking at them yet again through the fence. By the time Dean was beaming as she offered them another serving of cherry pie (‘I will _pay you_ to make me pies, Maeve, seriously’), and Erin had stood to light the citronella torches all around the patio, Maeve was weary and bewildered, because Sam Winchester seemed clever and kind and shy, and nothing at all but human.

It was late evening by then, the sky still blue overhead but starting to go gold and purple in the west, and Dean and Erin had been talking animatedly together about engines, when, ‘Mr. Winchester,’ Erin finally told him, standing, ‘I’m deputizing you to help me fix my lawn mower, if you care to,’ and Dean grinned up at her like a little boy, all sparkling green eyes and shining smile.  Erin went in to grab them two more beers from the fridge, and Dean leaned over to steal a forkful of Sam’s pie (‘Dude!’), and then the two of them were sauntering off across the lawn toward the shed together.  Maeve watched Sam as he watched Dean go, and a moment later she had to look away from him, because the tender, heart-deep affection in his face—that was how Elías had used to look at her, sometimes, when he’d thought she couldn’t see him, and her eyes stung, suddenly, with the memory of it.  

How could anything evil feel love like that?

The fading light was catching in the soft tumble of his hair when she looked back at him, where he was sitting quietly, eyes now on his hands as he rubbed a thumb back and forth contemplatively along the side of his empty tea glass. Somewhere, across the street maybe, a child was shrieking in happy laughter. 

'Dean's never been able to taste holy water,' he said, quietly, out of absolutely nowhere. She took the shock of it in the pit of her stomach, cramping and tight, and as he looked up he settled one of his big hands on hers, calloused and scarred and as careful as if he were cupping a hurt baby bird. 'Maeve, I'm not trying to pry,' he said, still quietly, so earnestly. ‘And God knows I only approve of protections, okay? Protections are great. It’s just that I can taste holy water in this tea— _serious_ holy water in this tea, Jesus—and your fence is made of rowan, and you've got nothing but blackberry and boxwood bushes all around your house, and that's . . . that's a lot of protections, to find in one place.' His voice was worried, as was his lovely face. 'And if there’s something dangerous here, something that you’re afraid of? Dean and I need to know about it. We can take care of it, whatever it is, no matter how . . . how crazy or unbelievable it might seem.  It’s kind of what we do.’

_It’s kind of what we do._

Time blurred. She was seventy-three and sitting out in her backyard with a man who carried an impossible scar, and at the same time, for half a heartbeat, she was also fourteen years old again, sitting with a near-stranger, a near-friend, at the edge of a canyon behind a house in Mexico.  It was early morning, Maeve’s parents and Erin still asleep inside, airline tickets and the urn with Keara’s ashes on the kitchen counter. Maeve could still remember, all these years later, the scent and feel of the woman beside her, could still see the scuffed leather of her boots, the soft worn cotton of her tee. Alejandra had seemed so old to her then, so sure of herself, but she probably hadn’t yet been thirty. _Monstruos son reales,_ she’d told her, softly, there in the soft, soft light of the sunrise.  _Lo siento, cariño, lo siento mucho, pero monstruos, demonios, brujas, fantasmas—todos son reales.  Los cazamos, mi hermana y yo.  Los matamos. Ese . . . ese es nuestro trabajo._

She blinked, and Sam was looking at her, steadily, worriedly, with the same kind of haunted eyes that had once looked at her out of Alejandra’s face.  Combat veterans, she’d thought, and she’d been right, in a way.  ‘You’re _cazadores_ ,’ she said, quietly, because it had been in Spanish that the word had first come into her life, and it had been in Spanish that she’d kept the world of witches and monsters ever since.

Sam didn’t ask for a translation, just nodded, once.  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, as quietly.

She sat staring at him in utter disbelief for a moment, then huffed out a weary laugh and folded her arms on the table and let her head drop down to rest on them, her whole body suddenly limp with both exhaustion and relief. ' _Cazadores_ ,' she said finally, voice muffled against her arm, and rolled her head to look over at him with one eye. 'Jesus Christ, Sam, I thought you were probably a demon. Or a shifter. I was trying to figure out how to stab you with the butter knife, for God's sake.' She paused. 'It's silver,' she added, as though that explained things.

Sam blinked.  ‘. . . what?’

‘I saw you hanging laundry the other afternoon.’ After a moment she sighed and sat up, reached for the pitcher of tea, topped off both their glasses. Wished rather dearly that it were whiskey instead of cold Bigelow green, because she could have frankly used a drink. ‘You don’t have nosy old ladies for neighbors, I promise; we're not going to be climbing the drainpipes and peering in your windows. I was just cutting lilacs at the sink, when you came outside. But I saw your back, all the same.’

It took him a minute to understand what she was saying—she could see it when he did, the lively, lovely animation of his face shutting down—and her heart _hurt_ at that for him, because what kind of other terrible things had this man endured, that he could forget so easily about impossible wounds? ‘I was a line nurse in Vietnam,’ she continued.  ‘I’ve seen that kind of wound before.  I’ve never seen a man survive it.’  She didn’t drop her gaze.  ‘And so. I thought you were a demon, walking around in a dead man’s skin.’

Sam stared at her, wordless for a moment. Then: 'No,' he said, softly. 'Maeve, Jesus, no, I—that scar of mine, it’s . . .’ He looked down at his hands, wrapped where they were now around the sweating glass of tea, and though he was a man clearly in his early forties, with faint lines at his mouth and eyes and a long streak of white running through his hair, for a moment he looked no older than her grandson.  ‘It should have killed me,' he said, finally. 'Obviously, it should have killed me, and why I'm still breathing anyway is . . . it's a long story, and I think I'd need to be drinking something stronger than tea to tell it, these days. But I'm not evil, Maeve, I promise you.' His eyes glinted gold a little as he looked up and they caught the dying sunlight. 'I'm damaged, a little, I think, maybe, after all these years, but I'm . . . _human_ , I'm still human, and I'm not . . . I'm not evil.' In his voice there was something soft and tired and sad and hurting and true. 'Please believe me. Please.'

It was an odd evening, Maeve thought, that in the space of two hours could take you from worrying about your neighbor being a demon to wanting to wrap him in a blanket and make him a grilled cheese sandwich and some soup. 'Not evil,' she said at last, sipping at her tea, and nodded, once, belief and acceptance both. 'Somehow breathing. Still human. All right,' she told him, and Sam's smile was small and grateful and sweet.

'Were you—are you—a hunter?' he asked, hesitantly, a moment later. 'I—'

‘No.’  She shook her head.  ‘God, no. I was never brave enough for that. Spiking the drinks of dinner guests now and then and putting out the good silver?  That’s about as far as I go, beyond the fence and the bushes. But my sister, she—we had an older sister, Erin and I.  She died when I was fourteen, when we were living in Mexico for the first time.  Erin barely remembers her; she was just a little girl when Keara . . . when she died.’ 

'What happened?'

The sudden memory was sweet and painful both: Keara, smiling as she crouched down in a dusty sunbeam, stretching her cupped hands out in welcome to the tarantula making its slow way across the floor. _Hey there, pretty boy._   Maeve shrugged, looked down at the ice cubes melting in her tea. ‘There was a monster,’ she said, simply. Her throat hurt a little; she cleared her throat. It was odd, it was so odd, to talk about this after all these years. ‘This was back in the sixties, when our parents were working in Mexico. There was a ghost town, not far away from where we lived.  Keara used to go all the time, because she loved how many spiders there were in the old houses, and I used to tag along just because I loved _her_.’  She was quiet for a moment, remembering; Sam said nothing, just waited for her, patiently. ‘It came straight through a wall,’ she said quietly.  ‘The thing that killed her, it came straight through a wall.  We were inside one of the houses one afternoon, like we’d been I don’t even know how many times before, and there was this—this _noise_ from outside, and then the wall came down, and that thing, it—it never paused, not even for a second.  All scales and claws and teeth, and Keara . . . she never even had time to scream.’ She pushed a hand back through her hair. ‘Two women came charging through behind it, not more than five seconds after, and shot it dead.’ Even now, all these years later, the memories were still so clear: the grey in the older woman’s braid; the wail of the thing as it died; the warmth of the younger woman’s arms, when she’d scooped her up, all five bony feet of her, and carried her out of the room like she was a baby girl, away from the shocking _red_ of the pieces of Keara’s body strewn across the floor.  ‘No one listened to me, obviously, when I told them what had happened; they thought I’d cracked up.  My parents put me in the hospital.  And the police decided it had been a wild animal attack.  Like there were even animals around there that could have _done_ what . . .’ She sighed. ‘The younger woman, Alejandra, she’d left a number with me, someone who knew how to find her, in case I needed anything. I called maybe two months later, a few weeks before our parents were going to bring us back to the States. She came back to see me, and told me about what lives in the dark. Brought me some holy water and some silver, taught me a little about rowan and boxwood and blackberry, showed me runes to carve in doorposts, in window frames.' She looked around their big yard. 'My parents wouldn't let me do a thing to our house in Texas when we first came back, but landscaping this place cost a fortune when Elías and I first bought it, back when dinosaurs were still walking the earth. Poor man thought I'd lost my ever-loving mind.' 

'You never told him?'

She shook her head. 'No. Why would I? He'd grown up in a crime family in Mexico City, gotten out when he was twenty. He'd dealt with enough evil. I didn't want to add 'monsters with big claws who will eat you' to the list.' Her eyes drifted toward her sister, who was working on her beloved lawnmower while Dean sat cross-legged on the shed floor and handed her things. 'I never told Erin, either,' she said softly. 'Sometimes I think I should have; Keara was as much her family as she was mine, but I just . . . she's my baby sister, and she . . . she _would_ have gone tearing off into the dark, and I didn't want that for her. I wanted to keep her safe.' 

She didn't quite understand the small, wry quirk of his mouth at that. 'Yeah,' he agreed. 'Yeah, I know how that goes.'

'You have siblings?'

'A brother,' he said, settling himself more comfortably in his chair. 'Four and half years older. He tries really hard to keep me safe, too. Always has, ever since we were kids.'

'He knows you hunt?'

'He taught me how to. He and our dad. Everything I know.'

'Then he's had a harder job of it than I have, I imagine,' she said. 'The only evil things that Erin chases are Republicans. Off of our street while the poor bastards are trying to campaign, and they're usually too terrified to try fighting back.'

Sam smiled, a real smile, a quick bright flash of straight white teeth and dimples. 'Yeah, well,' he said. 'Sounds dangerous enough to me.'

She looked at him a moment, seriously. 'You're not hunting anything here?' she asked. 'In Ithaca?'

'No.' He shook his head, swift and sure, with another small, sweet quirk of that pretty mouth. 'Well, retirement, maybe,' he added, and then sighed, rubbed absently at the back of his neck. 'I think, at least. Not sure yet whether it's going to be permanent.' He looked over at the bright open shed, at where Dean was chatting animatedly with her sister across the toolbox. 'But we need to rest, the two of us, at least for a little while. The past few months, they've been . . . it was a hard hunt, this time. Hardest we've ever had, and that's . . . that's saying something, really.'

She looked at his sharp profile, limned in the last of the day's light, the faint scar at the corner of his mouth, the streak of white though his hair that she would be now willing to bet was due to something other than age. 'Well, you seem like clean and virtuous boys,' she said at last, and then, solemnly and grandly, as he turned to look at her: 'You need to rest, you may come over and nap in our hammock anytime you'd like.'

Sam laughed at that, from his chest, a brief, vivid bark of brightness in the gathering dark, and Maeve saw Dean turn his impossibly pretty head at the sound, and smile.

***

Later, after the triumphant revving of the repaired lawn mower had set Barnabas' damn poodle off again, and after she'd boxed up the rest of the pie for the Winchesters and Sam had bent to kiss her cheek in farewell, and after she'd looked in on Erin as she always did to be sure her little sister was sleeping soundly before she herself turned in, Maeve curled into her bed, and she slept long and deep without dreaming.


End file.
